1.1.3  Who Can Use POV-Ray for Unix?

Almost anyone can use POV-Ray for Unix. If you have never seen a ray tracing program before, you can have great fun just rendering the sample scenes and animations installed together with POV-Ray for Unix. Once you have studied some scene files and spent a little bit of time reading this documentation, you can start putting basic scene files together.

Remember, though, that you do need to invest some time getting to know the program. For instance, you do not have to worry about most of the POV-Ray settings at first, but some of them are critical. Ignore them and POV-Ray for Unix may not do what you expect. The default settings have been selected so as to be satisfactory in the large majority of cases, but sometimes they will not give you what you want. Don't give up. The solution is bound to be a simple one, as long as you take the time to read the documentation. Investing a little bit of time getting to know the program will pay off - guaranteed!

As for experienced POV-Ray users, you will find that running POV-Ray in a Unix environment makes life much easier. Working under Unix means you can use editors and other powerful tools with which you may already be quite familiar. POV-Ray modes exist for popular text editors such as Emacs, and these provide many of the features found in the POV-Ray GUI interface on other platforms.

1.1.4  Spelling

Some US Residents have commented on the spelling of some words such as colour, initialisation, and minimised (they expect color, initialization, or minimized). POV-Ray is an international effort and as such our spelling sometimes conforms to British, European, or Australian, rather than American, English. You'll find examples of this both in this document and in POV-Ray itself (for example, POV accepts both 'color' and 'colour' as valid keywords).

1.1.5  Reporting Bugs

There is a section in this help file for bug reports. Make sure that you read it before sending us a complaint/bug report !

1.1.6  Trademarks

The terms 'POV-Ray', 'Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer', and 'POV-Team' are trademarks of the Persistence of Vision Development Team.

'Unix' is a trademark of UNIX System Laboratories. 'Linux' is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. X Window System is a trademark of X Consortium, Inc. All other trademarks are acknowledged as being the property of their respective owners.